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X-WR-CALDESC:Events for UCLA Communication
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240516T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240516T121500
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20230912T040720Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240513T172758Z
UID:6791-1715857200-1715861700@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Department Speaker Series: Megan Burkhardt-Reed (UCLA\, Communication)
DESCRIPTION:Title: The emergence of communication in infancy: Development and evolution \n  \nAbstract: \nDo gestures truly precede vocalization in modern human development and in the evolutionary origin of language? Or is vocalization more foundational for communication? Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the evolutionary origins of language. Speculations on the evolution of language have evoked comparisons across human and non-human primate communication. However\, many argue that the origins of language relate closely to the origins of modern human infantbehavior. To the extent that the issue of language origins has been raised\, most recent published opinions exploring evolutionary possibilities have leaned toward a “gesture-first”hypothesis. But much empirical information does not accord with the gestural claims. \n\nIn this talk\, I will present findings from two of my longitudinal studies that systematically compare rates of gestural and vocal communication across the first two years of life. The findings from this research reveal that the bulk of activity in the first and second year of life are in the vocal domain rather than gestural\, suggesting a more foundational role of voice. I will propose a framework to allow comparable counting of communicative and/or potentially communicative events of both infant gesture and vocalization. To date\, clear definitions and criteria for classification have not been a major focus of empirical investigation on gesture and vocalization as language foundations in prior research. I will also outline my current study on understanding the ways older infants continue to babble and speak and the ways caregivers respond to these communications and then present some of the methodology for conducting this work. I will conclude with thoughts on the broader implications of my findings and future directions of my program of research.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/department-speaker-series-megan-burkhardt-reed-ucla/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Department Speaker Series
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240430T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240430T123000
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20240328T064751Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240429T234300Z
UID:7238-1714474800-1714480200@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:CPG: Nikki Usher (USD)
DESCRIPTION:Title: How and why American journalism (accidentally) amplifies anti-democratic actors: Small town extremists\, media storms\, and a broken news industry \n  \nAbstract: Within a week\, a no-name Republican state representative from a town of 384 people in Illinois catapulted from obscurity to a prime-time appearance on Fox News’ Ingraham Angle. This newly-empowered politician\, Darren Bailey\, would go on to hijack the pro-business Republican party in Illinois toward extremism. Democratic backsliding emerges across all levels of politics\, but the threats posed by small town politicians to the rule of law have been overlooked. This research asks\, first what features of local political ecologies that might facilitate the rise of small town anti-democratic extremists? Second\, how does the political economy of the contemporary  news ecosystem–local\, regional\, national\, and partisan media–serve to amplify these bad actors? Ultimately\, this case study considers how small-town extremists are enabled by the structural\, cultural\, and normative dimensions of democratic life that they seek to undermine\, especially the difficulty the institutional news media faces in covering anti-democratic actors.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/cpg-nikki-usher-usd/
LOCATION:Comm Project Room – 2310 Rolfe
CATEGORIES:Communication and Politics Group
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240411T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240411T121500
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20240123T010419Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240404T025040Z
UID:7109-1712833200-1712837700@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Department Speaker Series: Emilio Ferrara (USC\, Communication & Computer Science)
DESCRIPTION:TITLE: AI & Social Manipulation \n  \nABSTRACT: In this talk\, I will overview my decadelong journey into understanding the implications of online platform manipulation. I’ll start from detecting malicious bots and other forms of manipulation including troll accounts\, coordinated campaigns\, and disinformation operations. The impact of my work will be corroborated with examples of findings enabled by our technology\, e.g.\, our unveiling of the “Russian bots” operation prior to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election\, which informed official Senate investigations and new regulations. I will then illustrate similar issues with the 2020 U.S. Election\, as well as COVID-related conspiracies and public health misinformation. I’ll conclude by discussing the ML tools we developed to model online mis/disinformation\, reveal the malicious adversaries behind the curtains\, and characterize their activity\, behavior\, and strategies\, suggesting how they are changing the way researchers and study online platforms in the era of automation and artificial intelligence.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/department-speaker-series-emilio-ferrera-usc-communication-computer-science/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Department Speaker Series
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240306T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240306T163000
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20240123T010923Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240220T222420Z
UID:7115-1709737200-1709742600@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:CPG: Davin Phoenix (UCI\, Political Science)
DESCRIPTION:Title: Emotional Representation: Identifying the Characteristics and Consequences of Elected Officials Mirroring the Emotions of Their Constituents (with Christopher Stout\, Gregory Leslie\, and Elizabeth Schroeder)  \n  \nAbstract: In this study\, we identify a previously overlooked component of representation\, which we label ‘emotional representation.’ Emotional representation occurs when elected officials mirror the dominant emotional state of a constituent group through their public outreach. First\, to explore the existence of emotional representation\, we examine the degree to which members of Congress mirrored Black people’s documented increase in expressions of anger following the murder of\nGeorge Floyd in the Summer of 2020. Using a regression discontinuity design and sentiment analysis including 305\,358 tweets\, 190\,192 Facebook Posts\, and 35\,409 press releases\, we show that descriptively representative MCs provide the highest levels of emotional representation. Second\, to examine the impact of emotional representation\, we deploy a two-stage experiment to 390 Black respondents. We find that Black people who increased in anger after being primed with images of police violence view elected officials who engage in emotional representation as more\nfavorable\, empathetic\, and trustworthy.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/cpg-davin-phoenix-uci-political-science/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Communication and Politics Group
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240229T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240229T121500
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20230925T184021Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240220T221617Z
UID:6846-1709204400-1709208900@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Department Speaker Series: Carolyn Parkinson (UCLA\, Psychology)
DESCRIPTION:Title: The brain in the social world: Integrating approaches from psychology\, neuroscience\, and social network analysis\n \nAbstract: This talk will cover work integrating theory and methods from psychology\, neuroscience\, and social network analysis to examine how people track\, encode\, and are influenced by the social networks that they inhabit. One set of studies tests if\, when\, and how people retrieve knowledge of familiar others’ positions in their real-world social networks when encountering them. Related research tests how this knowledge\, once retrieved\, shapes downstream processing and behavior. A second set of studies tests if human social networks exhibit assortativity in how their members perceive\, interpret\, and respond to their environment. Consistent with this possibility\, we find that proximity between people within their social networks is linked to similar neural responses to naturalistic stimuli\, similar subjective construals of such stimuli\, and similar patterns of brain connectivity. A final set of studies examines how shared understanding relates to overall levels of social connectedness within communities. We find that people who process the world in a manner that is more reflective of community norms have greater overall levels of subjective and objective social connection. All human cognition is embedded within social networks\, but research on information processing within individuals has progressed largely separately from research on the social networks in which individuals are embedded. The set of findings to be reviewed in this talk suggests that integrating approaches from psychology\, neuroscience\, and social network analysis can provide new insights into how individuals perceive\, shape\, and are shaped by the structure of their social world.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/department-speaker-series-carolyn-parkinson-ucla-psych/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Department Speaker Series
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240125T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240125T121500
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20230816T164117Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240117T192248Z
UID:6737-1706180400-1706184900@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Department Speaker Series: Scott Page (University of Michigan\, Business\, Political Science\, Complex Systems\, and Economics)
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Scott E. Page (University of Michigan\, Santa Fe Institute). (website) \nTitle: Organizations and Cultural Coherence \nAbstract: I construct a mathematical framework to elucidate and analyze the interdependence between structural features of an organization and some of its cultural attributes.  By the structure of an organization\, I mean whether individual actions are assigned hierarchically\, agreed upon through a more equal democratic process\, or encouraged through incentives.  By culture\, I will focus on standard measurable features such as tightness\, individualism\, trust\, risk taking\, and uncertainty avoidance.  I show that congruence – the alignment of organization structure and culture – though an often articulated organizational goal does not\, except in rare cases\, imply efficiency.   The creation of a healthy\, constructive culture and not congruence should therefore be the goal of organizations. \n 
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/department-speaker-series-scott-page/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Department Speaker Series
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240124T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240124T163000
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20240123T010711Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240123T010748Z
UID:7112-1706108400-1706113800@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:CPG: Marlon Twyman (USC\, Communication & Computer Science)
DESCRIPTION:Title: Metawisdom of the Crowd: How Choice Within Aided Decision Making Can Make Crowd Wisdom Robust \n  \nAbstract: Quality information can improve individual judgments but make group decisions less accurate; if individuals attend to the same information\, the predictive diversity that underlies crowd wisdom may be lost. We explore this tension within the context of decision support systems that provide the choice of decision aids and before then primary judgments. We argue that whenever a set of decision aids induce diverse errors\, this structure leads to higher group accuracy because aid choice will exhibit predictive diversity itself. In two experiments—the prediction of inflation (N=1907\, pre-registered) and a tightly controlled bean-count estimation task (N=1198)—we find strong evidence for this.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/cpg-marlon-twyman-usc-communication-computer-science/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Communication and Politics Group
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231201T123000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231201T140000
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20230927T011123Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231109T161956Z
UID:6856-1701433800-1701439200@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:CPG: Je Hoon Chae (UCLA\, Communication)
DESCRIPTION:Title:Robust Persuasive Effect of Political Fact-Checking and Remaining Challenges \nAbstract:The proliferation of misinformation and the persistent gap in factual information among partisans represent significant concerns in contemporary U.S. politics. Fact-checking\, a journalistic intervention aimed at verifying the accuracy of claims and information\, is seen as a key strategy to address this issue. While early studies suggested a backfire effect\, where strong partisans reinforce their existing beliefs when presented with counter-attitudinal corrections from fact-checkers\, recent experimental evidence suggests this backfire effect is not replicable. Instead\, fact-checking effectively updates the factual beliefs of even staunch partisans in line with fact-checked information. This presentation addresses two critical questions. First\, to what extent is the persuasive effect of fact-checking effective across various scenarios? Through a series of randomized experimental designs\, I demonstrate that the persuasive effect of fact-checking remains robust even when presented by an out-group source\, when the credibility of fact-checkers is impaired\, or when headlines are automatically tagged on social media posts. Second\, how extensively do U.S. partisans consume fact-checking content\, particularly cross-cutting fact-checking? By analyzing original articles from PolitiFact\, their Twitter posts\, and retweet patterns\, I show that a disproportionate number of fact-checking articles written by PolitiFact\, a major political fact-checking organization\, are counter-attitudinal from the Republican standpoint. Furthermore\, the sharing patterns of these fact-checking posts suggest that Republicans or conservatives rarely share such content amongst themselves\, casting doubt on their exposure to cross-cutting fact-checking in their daily lives.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/cpg-je-hoon-chae-ucla-communication/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Communication and Politics Group
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231116T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231116T121500
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20230908T171750Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231031T183335Z
UID:6784-1700132400-1700136900@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Department Speaker Series: Swabha Swayamdipta (USC\, Computer Science)
DESCRIPTION:Title: Understanding Online Discourse through Social Context and Structured Pragmatics \nAbstract: In an increasingly online world\, understanding discourse on social media is akin to understanding our society. However\, when it comes to social media discourse\, a disproportionate amount of focus has been laid on content moderation via hate speech detection. In this talk\, I will address a key limitation of this application: existing hate speech detection systems are riddled with racial biases introduced during annotation\, which are reinforced and propagated by models trained on such data. I will present the inadequacies of current methods for debiasing hate speech detection and show how the subjectivity of this task design leads to debiasing failures. Next\, I will focus on uncovering the origin of bias in toxic language detection. I will demonstrate how annotators’ demographics and beliefs influence their toxicity ratings\, and how ignoring such societal context can lead to biased outcomes. Finally\, I will present some ongoing work on understanding online discourse on homelessness\, which presents some unique challenges. Overall\, I will argue for the value of rethinking traditional the hate speech classification task\, and the need for richer context and nuance when considering online discourse.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/swabha-swayamdipta-usc-computer-science/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Department Speaker Series
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231103T123000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231103T140000
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20230921T200053Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231031T184155Z
UID:6818-1699014600-1699020000@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:CPG: Christian Grose (USC\, Political Science)
DESCRIPTION:Title: Do Funding Communications Increase Election Officials’ Willingness to Open More Polling Places? A Field Experiment\n \nAbstract: Can encouragement communications cause election officials to open more polling places? Does increasing spending on elections to open more polling places lead to higher voter turnout? Public officials who administer elections make decisions about the operation of elections\, and these decisions are directly influenced by budgets available. However\, scholars of elections have rarely examined the role of budgets on elite choices regarding making it easier to vote. I theorize that some election administrators are stewards of voter access while others are not. A field experiment was conducted during the 2020 US general election where local election officials randomly received direct communications encouraging them to apply for funding by a nonpartisan university institute; and a control group of local election officials were not. Results of the field experiment show that the randomized communication led to a 3.9%-point increase in local officials applying for and receiving the funding compared to control group officials. In a 2SLS causal model and in correlational analyses\, there is evidence that exogenous increases to election budgets and exogenous increases in polling locations led to higher voter participation. The conclusions are that some public officials can be encouraged to increase voter access via budgetary or financial nudges and communications.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/cpg-christian-grose-usc-political-science/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Communication and Politics Group
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231019T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231019T121500
DTSTAMP:20260513T121638
CREATED:20230908T165601Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231012T164009Z
UID:6781-1697713200-1697717700@comm.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Department Speaker Series: Jimmy Calanchini (UCR\, Psych)
DESCRIPTION:Title: Putting the Environment Back in Person-Environment Fit\n \nAbstract: Psychology scientists have recognized for decades that individual behavior is a function of both the person and the environment. However\, due to a dominant focus on individual differences\, psychological data on intergroup bias have historically been collected through small\, controlled experiments with the individual as the unit of analysis – to the relative exclusion of the environment. Recent technological advancements facilitate massive amounts of data to be collected from diverse populations and locations. Capitalizing on these newly-available data\, researchers can geolocate the responses of individuals to provide insight into regional variation in intergroup biases with a degree of ecological validity impossible in the laboratory. In this talk\, I will present correlational evidence linking regional biases to outcomes of consequence\, propose a novel theoretical perspective for understanding regional intergroup bias\, and discuss future directions for this emerging line of research.
URL:https://comm.ucla.edu/event/department-speaker-series-jimmy-calanchini-ucr-psych/
LOCATION:Comm Conference Room – Rolfe 2303
CATEGORIES:Department Speaker Series
END:VEVENT
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